Category Archives: oa.interviews

Will AI Chatbots Boost Efforts to Make Scholarly Articles Free? Peter Baldwin interview | EdSurge News, May 23, 2023

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“…Baldwin’s latest book, “Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All,” looks at the history and future of the open access movement. And fittingly, his publisher made a version of the book available free online. This professor is not arguing that all information should be free. He’s focused on freeing up scholarship made by those who have full-time jobs at colleges, and who are thus not expecting payment from their writing to make a living. In fact, he argues that the whole idea of academic research hinges on work being shared freely so that other scholars can build on someone else’s idea or see from another scholar’s work that they might be going down a dead-end path. The typical open access model makes scholarly articles free to the public by charging authors a processing fee to have their work published in the journal. And in some cases that has caused new kinds of challenges, since those fees are often paid by college libraries, and not every scholar in every discipline has equal access to support. The number of open access journals has grown over the years. But the majority of scholarly journals still follow the traditional subscription model, according to recent estimates. EdSurge recently connected with Baldwin to talk about where he sees the movement going….”

Alternative forms of peer feedback (s03e08)

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“Today, we would like to chat specifically about how an alternative peer review system might look, or how alternative forms of peer review, might look and what questions come up, what forms might they take? Do we even want to call that peer review and to simply have the space and create the space to explore these alternatives without the pressure of coming up with a final proposal that we can implement after this episode….”

Three Questions for Tracy Bergstrom – Ithaka S+R

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“Earlier this month, Tracy Bergstrom joined Ithaka S+R as a program manager focused on collections and infrastructure….

[From Tracy:] Libraries, archives, and museums exist for the enrichment of the communities they serve, and free and open access to knowledge is a critical component of establishing a more equitable society. While this underlying mission remains constant, the tools we need to administer this vision are evolving rapidly….”

New preprint explores tracing data reuse and citations – Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab

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“In our digital era, scientists are certainly sharing and reusing open data. Yet it remains unclear how widespread data reuse and citation practices are within academic disciplines, and why scientists cite—or do not cite—data in their research work. 

In a recent preprint from the Meaningful Data Counts project, Kathleen Gregory (postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna and University of Ottawa) and fellow ScholCommLab members—Anton Boudreau Ninkov, Chantal Ripp, Emma Roblin, Isabella Peters, and Stefanie Haustein—surveyed nearly 2,500 academic authors to explore their practices, preferences, and motivations for reusing and citing data, and how these practices vary by discipline. 

In this interview, we ask Kathleen about how she got involved in study, why some researchers cite and reuse data while others do not, and how her work informs data citation policies and standards in the scholarly community….”

An Interview with Lyrasis on Joining OASPA – OASPA

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“Lyrasis recently joined OASPA as member in the Infrastructure & Services (Non-Commercial) category. Lyrasis joins a growing list of almost 220 OASPA members.  We asked  Sharla Lair, Senior Strategist, Open Access & Scholarly Communication Initiatives, a few questions so we could learn more about Lyrasis and the decision to become an OASPA member….”

What is the future of book publishing? | Research Information

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“Open access is, of course, another type of innovation in the industry. The landscape for OA books is much less evolved and standardised than in the journal world – certainly regarding the STM (scientific, technical, and medical) disciplines that my organisation operates in. It’s a different story in the social sciences and humanities where the book is often the format of choice for sharing primary research findings and where funding support is driving change at a faster pace.

That said, OA is an option that our authors are likely to seek out on an increasingly frequent basis in the years to come and we are continually monitoring the new and innovative models that our fellow publishers are developing in this space. We can learn a lot from their experiences….”

The Library of Alexandra

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“How much does knowledge cost? While that sounds like an abstract question, the answer is surprisingly specific: $3,096,988,440.00. That’s how much the business of publishing scientific and academic research is worth. 

This is the story of one woman’s battle against a global network of academic journals that underlie published scientific research. In 2011, Alexandra Elbakyan had just moved home to Kazakhstan after a disappointing few years trying to study neuroscience in the United States when she landed on an internet forum where a bunch of scientists were all looking for the same thing: access to academic journal articles that were behind paywalls. That’s the moment the very simple, but enormously powerful, website called Sci Hub was born. 

The site holds over 88 million articles and serves up about a million downloads to people in practically every country on the globe. We travel to Kazakhstan to meet the mysterious woman behind it all and to find out what it takes to make everything we know about anything available to anyone anywhere, for free….”

preLights talks to Richard Sever – preLights

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“Richard Sever is Assistant Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press (CSHL Press) and co-founder of bioRxiv and medRxiv. Prior to moving to CSHL Press in 2008, he worked as an editor for several journals including Current Opinion in Cell Biology, Trends in Biochemical Sciences, and Journal of Cell Science. Here, we discuss Richard’s transition into the academic publishing industry, the journey that led him to co-found the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv with John Inglis, and his take on preprint peer review and the value it can hold for early-career researchers….”

Let’s Talk About Open Science!

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Welcome to “Open-ON-AIRE” our newly launched podcast series, a storytelling journey exploring Open Science principles and practices in Europe offering the expert perspective and insights of the OpenAIRE community. Our diverse network of experts and pioneers in scholarly communication and Open Science spans over 37 European countries and beyond, making it an invaluable resource for anyone interested in this exciting field.

The ambiguity of Open Science · Podcast

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“Richard Poynder has been observing and reporting on the evolution of the open access (OA) movement for twenty-two years now (e.g. here).

Richard and Jo discuss various topics of Open Science and Open Access, including the challenges of funding open access, the role of government in promoting open access, and the need for more transparency in the publishing industry. They also touch on the potential unintended consequences of policy changes and the importance of values in academia. Overall, the conversation highlights the complexity of the open-access landscape and the need for ongoing discussion and collaboration to address these issues.”

OA.mg: find and access research papers at lightning speed – scientifyRESEARCH

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“Preface: The first step in any research project is to read up on what others have done, and with OA.mg finding and accessing research papers is becoming easier than ever. We asked Cenk from OA.mg how they are working with the research community to make searching scientific literature better, and learned they are creating a world where knowledge is quickly accessible and open to everyone—and a future with shareable “Paper Playlists”! This interview is part of our ongoing series on innovative companies that are developing tools and support for your research….”

Chefs de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing’s Top Table – Ziyad Marar – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“What does open access (OA) / public access (PA) mean for your business?

It’s a slowish but profound reconfiguration of the research landscape. As William Gibson, the cyberpunk novelist, once put it ‘the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed’.  When it comes to gold OA there are parts of well-funded STM publishing that have gone OA already and the rest just should follow. And we are accelerating toward OA in this respect. But with social science (and the humanities), it’s a more complex story, and one that my colleagues and I don’t tire of telling. For instance, the National Science Foundation in the US has an annual budget of $9.8B, while the Social and Behavioral Science Directorate gets $285M of that, and yet the measly political science budget of around $18M is routinely targeted by US politicians as a ‘waste of taxpayers’ dollars. You can imagine what that does for a model based primarily on APCs!

Since it is not one size fits all, I feel we need to take a lead in differentiating the OA future by subject domain. Engineering and Sociology need different things to flourish. It is true to say that the growth of national and consortial transformative agreements can give us a way to transition across all subject domains, but I suspect this will still — as the deals are renewed and assessed by the biomedical model — be challenging for social science research for reasons that lead to them being under-valued more generally….”

Chefs de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing’s Top Table – Alison Mudditt – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“I believe that we’re finally at a tipping point not only for open access, but for a transformation to open research more broadly. Throughout the pandemic, we’ve seen global scientific collaboration on an unprecedented scale: results were shared immediately, and online sharing became the norm. It’s hard to make a moral case that other diseases or crises don’t deserve the same urgency. Support has been steadily building for years across national and international governments, agencies and funders. And now a growing voice of scientists and science organizations have joined them. Just one example: in a recent report, the International Science Council found the current system of scientific publishing to be failing in its ability to deliver on any of the core principles which affirm the record of science.

Critically, many of us are focused on how we can make the transition to open research in ways that embrace diversity and foster equity from the start. It’s been a fundamental failing of the “old” system and I’m relieved to see that an increasing number of us understand that tweaking that system just won’t do, and that more fundamental change is needed. With this comes the opportunity to rethink what gets shared and when, and how it gets both assessed and credited. It’s an incredible opportunity to build a system that better serves both science and scientists. While there are clearly systemic changes needed in the incentive and reward systems in academia, our work at PLOS demonstrates that meaningful progress can be made by pushing on elements of the current system….”

JAMA’s new editor brings open access and other changes – STAT

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“[Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo] recently spoke at the annual conference of the Association of Health Care Journalists, in St. Louis, where STAT’s Usha Lee McFarling sat down with her to learn more about the changes she’s implemented at the journal, including a new open access policy. Under this policy, most JAMA articles remain accessible only to subscribers, but authors can publicly post their research manuscripts the day they are published, and they are not charged open access fees as many journals do….

So what we decided as a journal was that authors, on the day we publish their work, can make their work available to any public repository and post it. So if you want to find the results of an article and you’re in a country or at an institution that doesn’t subscribe to our journals, you can still find that science because it’s available in a public repository. This decision is rooted in the principles of what’s good for science and it’s rooted in equity, frankly, because not all institutions, and not all people, have a subscription to JAMA.

This public access approach is also rooted in the principles of equity of who can publish. Open access has focused on mostly making sure there’s equity in what’s accessible to read, but that’s on the backs of sometimes very high fees that authors pay to publish in open access journals. What we’re saying is we believe in open access — and also believe in the value of what we do. We still think people will pay to subscribe to JAMA because there is value in the final version of record, the graphics editors making the figures, the podcasts, the corrections that get posted because things do change over time, that is what that subscription is buying you, all of those pieces.

But we can’t have open access fees put publishing out of reach for authors that might be early-career, or in disciplines or at institutions that aren’t as well-funded. We’re really pleased that the National Institutes of Health just announced and posted for public comment that this is the approach they are considering for all funded researchers in the NIH….”